Maximalist novel

The task of “Jests of the Infinite: Introduction to David Foster Wallace” is to mark some key aspects within the thought of the contemporary author David Foster Wallace. The main goal of the article is to open a conceptual field where the texts of a little known within the local context author could be discussed, analysed and criticised.

It is in this sense that the article is explicitly introductory and therefore limited not only to Wallace’s most famous work – the 1000+ pages maximalist novel “Infinite Jest” — but also to its title. Thus, what “Jests of the Infinite” presents is a speculative reading of the novel’s title, which is a quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. It is through this speculative reading that the article explores some of Wallace’s key ideas, themes and positions. Ideas and positions, which trace and weave together the fields of contemporary philosophy (both analytic and continental), Lacanian psychoanalysis and mathematics. So, what article еxplicates is how the mentioned fields can be found already within the title of Wallace’s maximalist novel. And furthermore, how such an explication opens the possibility for an interesting rethinking of modern culture’s constitutive tragedy (Hamlet) and also how it can ground the dynamic conceptual space for Wallace’s thought.

Last but not least, after the explication of the title, which will focus mainly on the concepts of the “jest” and the “infinite”, the article concludes with marking a specific counter-intuitive relation between Wallace’s thought and literary project and the philosophy of Alain Badiou whose project regards the fields of psychoanalysis and mathematics as crucial for the creation of a rigorous and operative contemporary ontology